Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The Princess

Eli was concerned about his latest dream. It rang with an eerie reality. Slowly he remembered...when he was just a lad his mother told him bedtime stories - fairy tales she called them. He thought they were the same stories every mother told their children. Ones from a fantasy land, but unlike King Arthur and Hansel and Gretel, her stories were tales of the animal kingdom.

Image source: djajakarta

The tale she told most often was about a princess who was raised by a family of giant birds. They lived at the top of a huge tree in the middle of the enchanted forest. They were the rulers of the forest and one day they found a tiny baby whose parents were killed by the beast who roamed the night just beyond the forest's edge. They took the baby to their nest, cared for her and raised her as their own. Because she was different, they made her a princess. For years the princess lived among the tree tops until one day she realized that she didn't belong here, that there was another world below. She bid a tearful good-bye to her bird family. Over the years, her family had grown and she had hundreds of siblings. They gathered to carry her safely to the ground where she began her new life.But now Eli questioned whether that was really a fairy tale. It might explain the weird dreams he had been having. Could his mother be the princess of her tale? Was she an orphan after all or was she really hatched?

Aha! In a moment I will explain that, but first let me say I thought the idea for the story is equal to other stories of children being raised by wolves for instance, and could be developed.The 'aha' was my realisation that the girl might have been a princess, but her parents were not killed.Her father is the guy in last week's magpie who sneaked into the nest and.......!